LGBTQ hypersensitivities have played a major role, after race and gender, in the intersectional hysteria that has gripped college campuses and, indeed, much of the left. Does growing mockery signal that sanity may be returning? If so, is there a path toward equality and supportive community that doesn’t invoke authoritarian-like thought control and the demonizing of white, heterosexual, cisgender males?

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Really not so funny:

More.Via Heterodox Academy: “In the wake of the violence at Middlebury and Berkeley…many commentators have begun analyzing the new campus culture of intersectionality as a form of fundamentalist religion including public rituals with more than a passing resemblance to witch-hunts.”

Good lord. I had no idea. The last time I wandered over to the University of Wisconsin campus (a month or two ago, Saturday morning) what I mostly saw was a lot of kids suffering from hangovers, not hysteria.

You have a bad habit lately of searching around the fringes of the left and blowing what you find there out of proportion, ramping up to your own version of hysteria (“left-fascist youth mobs”, and so on, ad nauseam).

You can always count on Tom to see no evil (on the left), hear no evil (on the left), speak no evil (of the left). If you don’t realize that a hysteria is gripping many of our campuses, you just don’t want to know.

If you don’t realize that a hysteria is gripping many of our campuses, you just don’t want to know.

Outside the confines of a half-dozen tiny elite liberal arts campuses which are notorious for off-the-wall liberalism, I’ll be you can’t find even a handful of campuses in which 5% or more of the students are involved in the supposed “hysteria”.

Sigh. Here we go again. Stephen, you’re becoming more “Gay Patriot-esque” with your posts. No, that’s not a compliment from me. What happened to the blog that I used to enjoy in contrast to the sheer zaniness of GP? It was much more nuanced, with more writers other than yourself (hint, hint), and didn’t constantly tubthump over a particular narrative. Or maybe this is just a reflection of the conservative movement going off the rails.

I think what’s happening is that the conservatives in general are doing the very same things they criticize the Left for doing.

This is political tribalism. It is driven by collectivist, hive-mind thinking. The enemy must be an undifferentiated mass, totally stripped of its individuality. And it’s only wrong when the other side does it.

I’ve begun to reengage with my friends and family on the Left. After the 2016 elections especially, those bridges needed to be rebuilt. None of the people I talk to behave the way IGF portrays them. I have a cross-section of friends, associates and relatives in terms of demographics, so they’re not all white middle-aged women like me. Some are actually (gasp!) college students.

They all know that there are SJW’s and snowflakes, and they’re even concerned about it. But they recognize this as a fringe problem. Whenever the loonies begin to get too powerful, it’s pretty much inevitable that the people in a movement who care about its direction will begin trying to get the train back on the tracks.

Political beasts love extremes–on the other side and on their own. They need collectivism. They don’t want to deal with individuals. What we’re seeing here, at this point, is simply outright propaganda.

… Mr. Miller’s in-ironic hysteria aside, the “leftward trend” of many universities is not a recent trend. The simple fact is, in order for a university to be “right-leaning” or “conservative”, they have to try really hard to maintain that bias. Because quite simply, it takes a peculiar kind of mind to say “hey, I’ve been in school since age 4, why don’t I stay in school till age 64?”

And of those that are happy to teach and/or do academic research? Most are “liberal” and not “conservative”.

So there’s no grand conspiracy to make universities “left”, it’s just that there aren’t that many “right” folks that actually want to teach and are qualified to teach higher education.

Until “conservatives” can find a way to make conservatives actually want to teach, that’s never going to change.

And that is what’s at the heart of the hysteria. That’s why Trump stood up and said “I love dumb people”. That’s why Santorum bragged “we will never have the elite, smart people on our side”. That’s why, for years now, conservatives have been making big news about how universities and colleges are “brainwashing” kids.

Not because there’s anything terribly shocking or new going on. It’s just that, as decades ago, most schools lean left.

I don’t mean to force people into adopting the mindset of Aunt Selma (its superiority should be self-evident), but that first video used the term “sexual preference.”

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IGF CultureWatch is a blog that originated with the Independent Gay Forum, a group of writers and activists who focused on advancing gay and lesbian legal equality and social inclusion beyond ideological rigidity and leftwing orthodoxy. more